Announcing OpenCX
OpenCX will be a home to open source software and initiatives to power and empower the CX community.
It’s been a unique experience to have brought two impactful Business Intelligence products to market. One has been a household name in contact centers around the world for almost 20 years now, and the second empowered some of the most innovative cities in the country to leverage their data for the greater good.
From Day 1, my intention has always been to empower front line people with the data and knowledge they need to thrive in whatever role they’re in. And as fun as it would be to bring a 3rd iteration into the world, I’m tired. And I suspect you are too.
I’m tired of being stuck in era where vendors keep you locked into their native reporting tools so they can charge you per-user licenses every month to access data that you own. Alternatively, you’re stuck paying for expensive specialized analytics tools to get prebuilt data-connectors and consolidated dashboards.
And while proprietary software has its place, reporting and dashboards are no longer one of them.
At this point, reporting and data models should be standardized across the industry. But they are not.
You should be able to run your tools on your own servers, or in any cloud you want, or select a partner to support you. It should be that simple.
Your data should be portable. If you want to switch contact center providers at some point, you should be able to do that without paying large integration fees.
If you want to create new views into your contact center, you should not have to hire a small team of data engineers to do it.
Reporting should also no longer have to be a consideration when choosing your technology provider. You should be in control.
So today, we're announcing OpenCX, with CX Ventures as the founding and permanent Sponsor.
OpenCX will be a home to open source software and initiatives to power and empower the CX community.
The first project we’re launching is around Apache Superset.
Superset is an open-source BI visualization and data exploration platform that originated from engineers at AirBnB and is designed to be user-friendly and capable of handling large-scale data analytics. It supports a wide variety of data sources and provides tools for creating interactive dashboards, generating visual reports, and sharing insights within an organization.
We’ve been using Superset with our contact center data at InflectionCX for a year now, and it’s allowed us to provide unlimited, unfettered, secure and governed data access across our team and clients, at the cost of one cloud server ($60 per month).
And as Xaqt starts shipping our AI platform, Superset is the dashboard tool. No more spending engineering resources building bespoke reporting frontends, and no more vendor lock-in or unnecessary expense for our customers.
We’re now developing the blueprints to an entire open-analytics stack, data connectors, data models and starter guides to create your own data-hub and CX analytics platform and program.
Other projects, including real-time analytics and AI will soon follow.
But this really isn’t about me. It’s about all of us. And it’s going to take a lot of people much smarter than me to collaborate and scale our collective know-how.
The power of open source is in the community. So we’re launching the OpenCX community on Slack. All are welcome, including vendors - but no sales pitches allowed.
And soon, you’ll be able to find us at OpenCX.cx and the CX Ventures GitHub repo.
Click here to join the slack community.
I look forward to seeing what we can do together.